I understand this is the most important use case (to stop a flood of emails after accidentally watching a category), but I’d love to see this for any change (e.g. to start fully watching a category I really care about).

Is there any chance to see this extended to all changes in watching state?

And yet, not noticed until now? So how important could it be? It is not expected that when someone joins a forum with 12 years of topics, and watches a category, they are now suddenly watching 3,000 old topics in that category.

The earlier adopter of a forum with 70,000 posts are going to have the same issues. Perhaps give a user a general warning if their watched topic count goes over 50,000, and allow them to mass-unwatch topics with no activity in X months?

But really, there’s no “watching” of a category at all then, is there. It’s always, “watch for new activity” and the UI should be updated to show this fact. I’m rather embarrassed, actually, that I’ve been using discourse for years and had absolutely no idea that Watching a category was not going to apply itself retroactively.

Continuing the discussion from Setting defaults to enable mailing list mode-Temporary Solution:
Anyone following me knows I’m all about mailing list mode. I love it because it keeps community content fresh in the face of our users.
The powers that be at discourse are all about the web-UI, and rightfully so… it’s beautiful, laid out well, easy to search, navigate, bookmark, link to, etc etc etc. It’s the best mailing list archive I’ve ever seen, period.
What occurs to me is that the behavior …

Because, no, users will not get posts made in topics in which existed before they joined.

I’m confused. Which probably explains why I’ve had some very confusing conversations with my users about their notifications.

The instructions when you’re watching a category from a category’s page are:

You will automatically watch all new topics in these categories. You will be notified of every new post in every topic, and a count of new replies will be shown.

(BTW, the language here should be changed to singular: “this category”.)

The instructions when you’re watching a category from your preferences page are:

You will automatically watch all new topics in these categories. You will be notified of all new posts and topics, and a count of new posts will also appear next to the topic.

(My emphasis in both cases.)

There’s a subtle difference between them that I hadn’t noticed before. What I thought happened once a user started watching a category is that they would be notified of “every new post in every topic”. But it sounds like they will only be notified for posts in new topics. Is this correct?

Here’s my plan. We have committees (<10 people each). I want them to be able to communicate easily, while leaving a record of their discussions outside of their email. For each committee I set up a group on Discourse along with a private category. I use a plugin to make the users of each group automatically watch the appropriate category.

I’ve luckily only rolled this out as an option to two committees to test out. We likely haven’t been affected because the creation of the groups, the categories, and the topics all coincided. But of course this won’t be the case when new members join the committees.

I chose to Discourse with this plan in mind: to move our Basecamp groups which only need a discussion space to our community forum. So I’d like to see this issue addressed somehow.

I’m happy to help you think through issues, given the limitations of my perspective and experience. Unfortunately, I haven’t played around with muting much. We’re a small private community, so it hasn’t been useful for us.

sam:

What happens if you watch a category, enter a topic and then mute it? We should display that that topic is muted after that fact.

Which means that when we are looking up tracking state, we always have to look up the specific tracking state for the topic.

I don’t follow. Isn’t that what Discourse does now anyway?

sam:

What if you muted it prior to watching the category? Are you watching the topic or is the topic muted?

What if you tracked it prior to watching the category? Are you watching the topic or tracking it?

It seems logical that the specific (i.e., topic-level state) should override the general (category-level state).

I would say that muted topics say muted. You must have had a good reason to do that in the first place.

But the intention of tracking is similar to watching. I think of it as a weaker form of watching. Based on the use of it I’ve seen in my community – not just the category-as-mailing-list but generally usage – I would say elevate the topics from tracking to watched. And do so without asking.

Now, if you or other people seem to find that too obnoxious, you might want to offer a choice when tracking. But I’d try to avoid the extra UI if possible. This is all pretty confusing as it is

I don’t know enough about Discourse’s internals, but let me suggest something. I don’t necessarily need my users to be watching all old topics (including locked ones and whatnot). What I want for them is to be notified of new posts, regardless of whether the topic was old or new.

Would it be less onerous to start watching old topics only when they have new posts? Again, I think I would ignore muted issues and elevate tracked issues to watched.